2013 Survey of Classical Music on Radio 3 = The Results - Part 1

[Suffolkcoastal]

A Happy New Year to all fellow MBs. Welcome to my 5th Annual Survey of Classical Music on Radio 3 outlining the music broadcast in 2013

For those who weren’t familiar with the survey methods outlined I’ve used here please see the brief resume I prepared in my posting on these Boards at the beginning of January 2011.

Overall Observations
No major ‘fests’ this year so skewering of figures. The Britten weekend did not just confine itself to Britten, so is included in all figures and the other various features did at least present a variety of composers during the course of their programmes.

1. Anniversary composers
An excellent year for Britten as one would have expected and Wagner and Verdi about on a par with what I was anticipating, if the Verdi was perhaps a touch lower. Lutoslawski did reasonably well until September then almost disappeared off the radar completely for some strange reason. Hindemith was treated appallingly, only a brief flourish in December paying the briefest of grudging lip service to his music. Dowland’s music tended to come in clumps through the year and Corelli actually did worse than he did in 2009. Poulenc surprisingly did only the same as last year, which given the large increase last year on previous years has just reinforced my suspicion that someone in R3 got his anniversary year wrong initially. One wonders with the large increase in Rameau this year, prior to his anniversary in 2014, whether or not the same thing has happened there. Gesualdo did a little below par from what I would have expected.

2. General observations
Two figures stand out as being of great concern and which reinforce the continual decline of R3 under the current regime. Firstly an absolutely shocking increase of nearly 33% in the amount of non-classical music broadcast in what were normally classical slots or programmes and secondly a further increase in the amount of works/chunks played by over 4%, which considering the three main anniversary composers were predominately opera composers, one would have expected to have gone down slightly Many composers continue to be represented by a small proportion of their output for example: Over 48% of the Bizet broadcast consists of chunks from Carmen, around 60% of the Bernstein consists of either extracts from West Side Story or Candide, 22% of the Tchaikovsky consisted of chunks from the three ballets, again the majority of the Parry is either I was Glad, Jerusalem or chunks from the Songs of Farewell, nearly 15% of Brahms are Hungarian Dances and nearly 22% of Dvorak consists of either Slavonic Dances or the ‘American Quartet’. British music benefitted slightly from a month of focus but the results were very hit and miss with many composers ultimately ending up with only roughly the same low totals as usual, Tippett and Bridge along with Purcell though benefitted from the Britten anniversary and it was at least good to see Tippett reach the 70s in total of works/chunks, even if that is still a fair bit below what he should be getting. Scandinavian music is still dominated by the big 3, with an improvement for Nielsen, but the rest a given minimal attention. American classical music had a mixed year, again a series helped the number of works and the variety a little, but too many composers are still represented by the same small number of works and others such as Ives, remain in the doldrums (it was Ives worst year since I began my survey), there was an unwelcome large increase in the amount of Gershwin to emphasise the notable swing towards ‘lighter music’. another poor year. Russian/Soviet 20th century music is still almost exclusively dominated by the usual suspects and there was a notable increase in the amount of ‘light’ Shostakovich (a favourite of CFM of course). French music continued its strong showing with yet another big increase in the amount of Faure and French Baroque also featured very strongly in the Baroque Spring programmes. Many of the same composers continued to struggle, for example, the amount of Bartok remains well below what one would expect, Honegger is in danger of disappearing altogether and Martinu remains low. The death of John Tavener resulted in a notable increase and the amount Richard Rodney Bennett remained buoyant following his death at the end of 2012. Compare this with the fate of the two great international composers who had died later in 2012, Henze and Carter, who music R3 almost ignored in 2013.
3. Composers ignored by R3 in 2012
These included composers such as: Milton Babbitt, Arnold Cooke, Gottfried von Einem, Englund, Fayrfax, R Fuchs, L Glass, Ivanovs, Kirchner, Martin Y Soler, A Merikanto, Muldowney, I Norholm, Popov, Siegmeister, Surinach, Ustvolskaya, T Wilson, Hugh Wood, B A Zimmermann.
4. Popular Repertoire Increase
This worrying continuing trend continued in 2013. Around half of the warhorses again did even better this year. Top of the list 109 Hungarian Dances (the highest since my survey began), 83 Slavonic Dances, and over 60 Schubert Impromptus, Debussy Preludes and bits from The Four Seasons, followed closely by chunks from The Nutcracker and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Mendelssohn) and the amount of chunks from The Firebird doubled.

5. The Symphony
I decided to again continue to monitor the number of complete symphonies broadcast, as this shows quite well the shift from playing complete works to bleeding chunks. There were a total of 1145 complete symphonies broadcast which was the highest in the three years, which still represents around 3.0% of the total classical works/extracts broadcast. Yet again a fair proportion is made up of shorter 18th century works. Below is a list of the composers who had 9 or more complete symphonies/sinfoniettas/sinfonias broadcast in 2013. Following on from a request last year I have also monitored how many times each complete symphony is performed by the more popular composers and the results are also listed below.

Composer Number
BEETHOVEN 102
MOZART W A 100
F J HAYDN 97
MENDELSSOHN 51
SIBELIUS 47
TCHAIKOVSKY 46
SCHUBERT 42
SCHUMANN 34
DVORAK 31
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 31
BRAHMS 30
MAHLER 29
SHOSTAKOVICH 28
PROKOFIEV 24
NIELSEN 23
BRITTEN 20
BACH CPE 18
BRUCKNER 18
BERLIOZ 12
ABEL 11
BOYCE 11
RACHMANINOV 11
ELGAR 9
JANACEK 9
LUTOSLAWSKI 9
STRAVINSKY 9


BEETHOVEN 12 7 11 10 13 11 18 14 6
BERLIOZ 7 5 0 0
BRAHMS 5 6 9 10
BRUCKNER 0 1 0 4 2 0 5 3 3
DVORAK 0 0 1 0 0 5 4 9 12
ELGAR 7 2 0
LUTOSLAWSKI 1 1 4 3
MAHLER 6 3 0 3 9 3 2 0 0 3
MENDELSSOHN 19 string 5 1 8 9 9
NIELSEN 1 6 2 6 2 6
PROKOFIEV 1 sinf 13 0 0 1 5 0 4
RACHMANINOV 2 7 2
SCHUBERT 0 5 8 2 7 4 0 8 8 0
SCHUMANN 7 9 5 13
SHOSTAKOVICH 3 1 0 0 5 3 2 3 4 3 3 0 0 1 0
SIBELIUS 8 6 5 5 7 6 10
STRAVINSKY 1 5 1 2
TCHAIKOVSKY 5 manfred 4 3 2 16 9 7
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 2 8 2 2 6 3 1 4 3

HAYDN A = 1 27 = 2 58 = 1 83 = 1 98 = 3
B = 1 35 = 1 59 = 4 86 = 1 99 = 3
6 = 2 38 = 1 60 = 4 88 = 4 100 = 2
7 = 1 39 = 4 64 = 2 91 = 1 101 = 1
8 = 5 43 = 2 67 = 1 93 = 2 103 = 1
9 = 1 45 = 3 68 = 1 94 = 4 104 = 8
22 = 2 47 = 1 73 = 5 95 = 2
25 = 2 48 = 2 77 = 1 96 = 2
26 = 7 55 = 1 79 = 1 97 = 3


MOZART kv19a = 1 23 = 6 35 = 5
1 = 5 24 = 1 36 = 5
4 = 4 25 = 8 38 = 10
5 = 2 26 = 2 39 = 5
6 = 1 28 = 1 40 = 6
7 = 1 29 = 7 41 = 14
16 = 1 30 = 1
17 = 1 31 = 3
19 = 2 32 = 2
21 = 1 33 = 5

The Mendelssohn includes the String Symphonies, though there weren’t many of them broadcast. Some of the notable composers who didn’t have any complete symphonies broadcast include Copland, Glazunov, Henze, Honegger, Miaskovsky, Panufnik, Parry, F Schmidt, J & K Stamitz.
6. The Results*
There were over 37,700 works/extracts performed in 2013, by over 2300 composers which, is as mentioned earlier, quite an increase on 2012. There were around 410 composers who featured in 2013 that didn’t feature in 2009-12 and around 1900 composers who featured in 2009-12 that didn’t feature in 2013. However over 930 of the composers featured in 2013 are represented by one extract/work only (roughly on a par with 2012) and only a little over 380 composers had more than 10 works/extracts broadcast (very slightly up on 2012). As mentioned above the amount of non-classical music broadcast in programmes that are mainly considered to be classical way up on previous years, by around 33%.
*The results do not include regular jazz or world music programmes, though I include the ‘classical’ music pieces featured in ‘Late Junction’, the proportion of which has remained fairly constant.
There were 56 composers who had over 100 works/extracts broadcast on R3 in 2013, exactly the same surprisingly as 2012. These are listed below in descending order with the 2011/12 positions and the % increase or decrease compared to 2010 and 2011 indicated (the minus indicates a percentage decrease). The comparison with the 2012 figures for Schubert do not include the nearly 1200 works/extracts played during the Schubertfest in 2012 and as mentioned last year above 3% of normal R3 broadcast time was lost to the ‘fest’ .

[Suffolkcoastal]

7. Overall results
The figures show 2013 position, composer, 2013 total, 2011 position, 2012 position and the % difference from 2011 & 2012 in that order. I believe that I noted well over 99.5% of all music broadcast, though these figures do not include one Thursday ‘Breakfast’ programme in December as the iplayer of the broadcast was never available nor was the playlist ever published, (the one showing is a duplicate of the following week’s). I expect some idiot accidently deleted the recording for the iplayer, R3 were silent on the issue (of course). As I may have missed the odd chunk here and there the figures are rounded to the nearest 5 (i.e. 95-99 = 95+), this keeps the figures consistent each year.

Composer Name 2013 `````2011 2012 Diff from 2011 Diff from 2012

1 BACH J S `````1510+`````2 1 `8.40% `````5.52%
2 MOZART W A````1440+`````1 2 `3.45% `````5.03%
3 SCHUBERT `````1085+`````4 4 `16.54% `````13.02%
4 BEETHOVEN `````1015+`````3 3 `-5.57% `````-5.91%
5 BRITTEN `````800+ `````18 18 `145.71% `````112.47%
6 HANDEL `````760+ `````6 7 `4.82% `````5.40%
7 BRAHMS `````745+ `````5 6 `-3.36% ````-2.61%
8 CHOPIN `````735+ `````9 5 `10.46% ````-5.81%
9 HAYDN F J `````660+ `````8 9 `8.34% `````1.38%
10 SCHUMANN R````570+ `````12 11 `10.83% `````4.75%
11 TCHAIKOVSKY```565+ `````13 13 `14.26% ````13.12%
12 DVORAK `````525+ `````10 12 `0.96% `````3.94%
13 MENDELSSOHN ``500+ `````15 10 `5.45% ```-10.50%
14 DEBUSSY `````495+ `````14 8 `1.22% ```-24.96%
15 VIVALDI `````460+ `````11 15 `-10.98% ````-1.07%
16 VERDI ``````````450+ `````27 31 `90.68% ```115.31%
17 WAGNER R `````435+ `````34 28 `105.63% ````79.51%
18 LISZT ``````````405+ `````9 14 `-33.34% ```-16.63%
19 RAVEL `````405+ `````16 16 `-2.88% ```-10.20%
20 ELGAR `````370+ `````22 17 `17.41% ```-7.94%
21 PURCELL H `````355+ `````23 29 `21.09% ```47.11%
22 FAURE `````330+ `````30 25 `51.82% ```20.58%
23 SIBELIUS `````325+ `````21 22 `3.15% ```10.47%
24 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS`325+```25 23 `35.27% ```10.88%
25 GRIEG ``````````325+ `````19 19 `0.62% ``-12.16%
26 RACHMANINOV```325+ `````17 20 `-1.81% ```-0.61%
27 STRAUSS R `````305+ `````20 21 `-5.28% ```-2.24%
28 PROKOFIEV S````295+ `````26 26 `24.58% ```11.57%
29 STRAVINSKY`````285+ `````33 32 `35.68% ```41.67%
30 SHOSTAKOVICH``280+ `````29 24 `22.27% ```-0.71%
31 SAINT-SAENS````260+ `````24 27 `-1.50% ````3.95%
32 TELEMANN `````235+ `````35 30 `13.40% ````4.87%
33 GERSHWIN `````215+ `````36 38 `14.97% ```29.52%
34 ROSSINI `````215+ `````32 36 `0.47% ```22.86%
35 BERLIOZ `````210+ `````37 33 `18.54% ```4.46%
36 POULENC `````190+ `````52 34 `60.00% ``-0.52%
37 STRAUSS J``````190+ `````40 37 `15.85% ``13.10%
38 MAHLER G```````180+ `````28 39 `-22.98% ```9.70%
39 MONTEVERDI`````175+ `````38 45 `2.91% ``25.53%
40 RAMEAU `````175+ `````53 49 `50.43% ``40.80%
41 HOLST G `````165+ `````46 47 `18.44% ``23.70%
42 WEBER `````165+ `````39 42 `-4.65% ```4.46%
43 BARTOK `````155+ `````41 43 `-0.64% ```1.96%
44 WALTON `````155+ `````56 41 `40.91% ``-4.32%
45 DOWLAND `````150+ ````114 56 `250.00% ``52.48%
46 BYRD ``````````145+ `````54 40 `28.45% ``-9.15%
47 SCARLATTI `````145+ `````42 44 `-5.81% ```0.00%
48 NIELSEN C `````140+ `````50 60 `15.57% ``51.61%
49 PUCCINI `````135+ `````47 48 `8.59% ```4.51%
50 COPLAND `````120+ `````62 59 `58.82% ``45.16%
51 JANACEK `````120+ `````48 57 `-4.76% ``23.71%
52 GRAINGER `````115+ `````31 54 `-46.33% ```0.00%
53 BERNSTEIN L`````110+ `````75 58 `44.16% ``18.09%
54 BIZET ``````````100+ `````55 46 `-7.27% ``-24.44%
55 BRUCKNER `````100+ `````49 51 `-17.21% ``-17.89%
56 COUPERIN F `````100+ ````109 77 `119.57% ``48.53%

Composers with between 50 & 99 works/chunks below:
57 BACH C P E ```````95+ ``43 ``50 ``-35.29% -19.51%
RESPIGHI ```````95+
RIMSKY KORSAKOV``95+ ```51 52 ``-18.85% -18.18%
60 WILLIAMS J ```````95+
61 CORELLI ```````90+
GOUNOD ``````90+
63 KORNGOLD ``````85+
PALESTRINA `85+
65 BRIDGE ``````85+
66 PARRY H ``````85+
TALLIS ``````85+
68 CHABRIER ````````80+
69 DELIUS ````````80+ 60 35 -4.60% -113.25%
FALLA ````````80+
71 LULLY `````````````80+
MUSSORGSKY ```80+
73 KREISLER ````````75+
LUTOSLAWSKI ```75+
75 ARNOLD ````````75+
76 BARBER ````````75+
WOLF H ````````75+
78 FRANCK C `````````75+
KODALY ```````````75+
TIPPETT ````````75+
81 BOCCHERINI````````70+
82 ALBENIZ ````````70+
GESUALDO ````````70+
GLUCK ````````70+
SMETANA ````````70+
86 GLAZUNOV ````````65+
87 GLINKA ````````65+
88 SUK `````````````65+
89 BORODIN ````````60+
SATIE ````````60+
VILLA LOBOS ```60+
92 SULLIVAN ````````60+
93 SCHOENBERG ```60+
VICTORIA ````````60+
95 DELIBES ````````60+
96 STANFORD ````````60+
97 GABRIELI G ````````55+ 53 45.00% -50.43%
HUMMEL ````````55+
SZYMANOWSKI ```55+
100 BENNETT R RODNEY``55+
FINZI `````````````55+
MONIUSZKO ```55+
103 IRELAND J ````````55+
104 SVENDSEN ````````55+
105 ALBINONI ````````50+
106 DUPARC ````````50+
MESSIAEN ````````50+
108 BRUCH ````````50+
MARTINU ````````50+
MASCAGNI ````````50+
PAGANINI ````````50+
TAVENER ````````50+
113 MACMILLAN ````````50+
PART `````````````50+
115 CHAUSSON ````````50+
LIGETI ````````50+

[Beef Oven!]

Many thanks for this summary. Most interesting and much to let 'sink-in'.

What is the definition of 'classical' music that we're using here?

[Roehre]

Many thanks for all your trouble and your observations SC, much appreciated

[french frank]

Just an initial 'thank you' sc, before studying what you are saying in more detail ...

[EdgeleyRob]

Yes SC,thanks from me too,a great piece of work and a lot to take in.
No complete Parry Symphonies,shocking.
Does Weinberg ever get played on R3 ?

[Suffolkcoastal]

Yes SC,thanks from me too,a great piece of work and a lot to take in.
No complete Parry Symphonies,shocking.
Does Weinberg ever get played on R3 ?

Just two Weinberg chunks in 2013 ER, no complete symphonies in the last 3 years either.

[teamsaint]

Incredible work, SC, and fascinating results.
Lets hope somebody at R3 sits up and takes notice.

Sad to see so little representation of contemporary composers. Also sad that so much C20 music gets ignored with 24 hour broadcasting. Plenty of the Soviet era symphonies, for instance, would be great on day time radio, and make for interesting comment by the presenters.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Many thanks SC for the continued contribution to our understanding of R3 .... i bet they do not do this for themselves ....

[french frank]

There were over 37,700 works/extracts performed in 2013, by over 2300 composers which, is as mentioned earlier, quite an increase on 2012.

I suppose most people who have to be impressed don't have much of a clue (numerically) how much music and how many composers (even relatively well-known) exist. I can quite see Radio 3 quoting those figures to smiles of approval ...

[Don Petter]

I suppose most people who have to be impressed don't have much of a clue (numerically) how much music and how many composers (even relatively well-known) exist. I can quite see Radio 3 quoting those figures to smiles of approval ...

So more and more BCs. We even had a single Mendelssohn movement in today's lunchtime concert, though I hope that was because the Elias had played it thus as an encore (or did R3 just chop them off at 2pm?).

[MrGongGong]

What is the definition of 'classical' music that we're using here?

Come on, keep up
'classical' composers are Dead, White and Male ...... obviously

Thanks for this SC always interesting stuff

[Suffolkcoastal]

I suppose most people who have to be impressed don't have much of a clue (numerically) how much music and how many composers (even relatively well-known) exist. I can quite see Radio 3 quoting those figures to smiles of approval ...

It does sound impressive and you could imagine R3 preening themselves. But then you look at the figures more closely and find that just 140 composers provide a little over 70% of the music on R3 and 40% of the 2300 composers are represented by just one single broadcast of a work/chunk.

With 5 years of data now one can clearly see which composers are 'in' and which 'out' under the current regime and I'm also getting an idea of what works by better known composers are also largely 'out'.

[Beef Oven!]

Come on, keep up
'classical' composers are Dead, White and Male ...... obviously

Thanks for this SC always interesting stuff

But it's a serious question.

A 33% increase in 'non-classical' music could be a bit of a 'deal-breaker', a major criticism of R3's fundamentals. As such, we should be clear about what we're talking about. It seems a bit vague, which is a shame, as a good deal of interesting information has been pulled together.

[MrGongGong]

But it's a serious question.

A 33% increase in 'non-classical' music could be a bit of a 'deal-breaker', a major criticism of R3's fundamentals. As such, we should be clear about what we're talking about. It seems a bit vague, which is a shame, as a good deal of interesting information has been pulled together.

Indeed
It is often interesting what things are called and how far that might be from what one imagines
take the London Centre of 'Contemporary Music' for example ....
or these chaps http://icmp.co.uk/

So it would be interesting to know